A better way to structure your Dropbox shared folders

12-SEP-2014

- 2 minute read

My Dropbox has grown organically over the years, from the feeble 2Gb back in 2008 to around 11Gb this year from all of the promo size upgrades and friend invites. It never had a great structure, some areas were well organised but the root folder was a mix of shared drives with friends, project folders and default Dropbox drives. It wasn't until I recently moved to a 1TB Pro plan that I figured I needed to sit down and actually sort this out.

The concern for me was what to do with all these shared folders sitting in the root drive, did they have to be there? Could they be moved within other folders? I wasn't quite sure how permissions coped with shifting folders but it turns out it's relatively easy. A simple and effective method is just to created an unshared root folder called something like 'Shared Folders' then within this folder place each one of your shared drives.

Dropbox tends to get freaky when you're placing shared drives into another shared drive, but if the root folder is not a shared folder then it has no problems. Each shared sub folder will only be visible to the users specified for that folder. Its permissions are not effected by the other shared folders on the same level.

I know, I know. This is obvious. But I didn't think about it until I started working on structuring my Dropbox. Maybe many of you are already structure your shared folders like this, but a quick ask-around my peers proved that this wasn't a common approach. It doesn't improve performance, but it does make things look tidy and helps with glance searching at the topmost level.

How do you structure your shared folders? If you know any other useful hints feel free to drop them in the comments below.